The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 444

Chapter 444: Dex Left So Fucking Fast

Serena left the window, walked to the far side of the bed, and sat in the chair. The chair. Elara’s chair. The sacred, precisely measured, do-not-touch-the-patient chair that Elara had been haunting for days like a very committed ghost with boundary issues.

Elara had memorized the distance from the chair to the bed.

Serena was now inside the safe range.

"He really does look better," Serena said, leaning forward. Her elbows found her knees. Her chin found her hands. Her face was eighteen inches from Gavriel’s blanket-wrapped body, and the eighteen inches were shrinking because Serena was studying his face.

Elara watched the distance close. Sixteen inches. Fourteen.

"Serena, the chair is closer than I usually sit."

"Is it?"

"Move it back about a foot. For the protocol."

Serena scooted the chair back without questioning it, because the protocol was Alaric’s.

The protocol. The fake, fabricated, entirely fictional protocol that Elara had been building like a house of cards over the course of several days. Every new rule she invented required three supporting lies, and every supporting lie required its own foundation, and the foundation was made of bullshit.

Close call number two. Survived.

Dex sat on the windowsill with his legs stretched in front of him, his arms crossed, and his posture relaxed. He had no idea that the room he was sitting in was a minefield.

"Do you know what’s wrong with his shoulder?" Dex asked.

Elara’s blood pressure spiked so hard she felt it in her teeth.

"What?" The word came out sharper than she intended.

"The bandage. It’s been on his shoulder since the coma started. The dark veins are gone. His color is back. Everything else healed. Why does the shoulder still need a bandage?"

Elara looked at him. The look was brief, controlled, carrying a neutral expression. Her internal monologue was screaming at a frequency that would have shattered glass.

"Deep tissue damage," she said. "The dark magic spikes entered through the shoulder. The surface healed but the underlying tissue is still regenerating. Alaric wants it covered to prevent infection during the regeneration period."

Every word of that was false. Every. Single. Word.

There were no spikes in Gavriel, which Elara thought of after she said it. Whoops. That one was on a clock.

Dex’s brows knit.

"Spikes in Gav? I thought there—"

"Yes," Elara cut him off. "Something about magical backlash traveling through the nearest muscle group. The physics of it."

"Magical backlash physics," Dex repeated.

"Yes."

"That’s a thing?" Dex asked.

No, it was not a thing. She had invented a field of study in real time to explain a bandage.

"Ask Hyran if you want a lecture. I am telling you what Alaric told me."

The Hyran card was her ace. She could play it once per conversation, and the playing ended the conversation every single time, because the threat of Hyran Thornfell explaining magical theory was the conversational equivalent of a nuclear deterrent. Nobody wanted it. Nobody called the bluff. The bluff was goddamn bulletproof.

"I’m good," Dex said.

Close call number three. Survived.

Serena was sore from training and shifted in her chair. The shift sent her right hand drifting over the edge of the bed, directly towards Gavriel’s blanket-covered hand. It was the pure, unthinking reach of a woman going for a friend’s hand... except this particular friend was currently a magical crime scene waiting to happen.

Elara saw it happening in slow motion.

The hand was coming down. The hand was going to land on the blanket, which was covering Gav’s hand, and the blanket was thick but not thick enough to block matebond magic, and the magic would travel through wool the way electricity traveled through water, and the traveling would produce a glow, and the glow would produce a question, and the question would produce the end of everything Elara had been maintaining.

Elara sneezed.

The sneeze was loud and explosive.

Serena’s hand jerked back. Reflex. The sneeze had startled her, and the startling had retracted the hand, and the retraction had bought Elara another thirty seconds of a life she was living on borrowed time and borrowed sneezes.

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